Officials with DART said the signs were not supposed to be on the buses in the first place.

DART's advertising director said the board never approved the signs and that they were put up by mistake. The Iowa Atheist and Free Thinkers group said the advertising director told them that the signs had been approved.

"When she met with us on May 27, we showed her the ads and asked if this could be controversial and she said she didn't think so," said the group's president, Randy Henderson. "She thought it was a nice ad, a safe ad."

The ads that went up on Saturday read, "Don't believe in God? You are not alone."

DART said it immediately started to receive complaints.

"Drivers said people weren't getting on buses or getting off the buses because of it," said advertising director Kirstin Baer-Harding. "So with all the calls, it wasn't something we wanted."

The signs came down on Aug. 4. Baer-Harding said they never should have gone up.

"The ads mistakenly got put on buses," she said.

She said DART has the final say on any advertisements and its board decided at the last minute that it didn't like the content. She said the mistake slipped in amid last week's chaos with the DART-pedestrian crash and the release of its first hybrid bus.

Members of the Iowa Atheist and Free Thinkers Group said they're upset because no one from DART will take their calls. They only received a brief e-mail.

"In that e-mail, it said they've received an overwhelming number of calls and the ads have been pulled," said Henderson.

"We were just trying to reach out to our audience," said member Lily Kryuchkov. "We weren't aiming against religious groups, so we don't understand why people are upset."

"We have our rights to free speech and we feel those have been violated," said Henderson.

The group said it had planned to run the ad on 20 buses throughout the month of August in hopes of capitalizing on the large number of people riding buses during the Iowa State Fair.

The group said it was waiting to hear back from DART before deciding what it will do next. Members said they hadn't paid any money for the signs yet because they hadn't received an invoice.

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